About Site Speed

The Site Speed reports show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content. You can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements.

The Site Speed reports measure three aspects of latency:

Page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site. You can view the data across different dimensions to see how quickly your pages loaded from a variety of perspectives (e.g., in different browsers, in different countries). Data is available in the Page Timings report.

Execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track (e.g., how quickly images load, response time to button clicks). Data is available in the User Timings report.

How quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction. No additional configuration is required to see this data. Data is available in the Page Timings report, on the DOM Timings subtabs.

Page Timings report

The Page Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual page performance. The report includes the following tabs and subtabs:

Explorer: Page data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions

Site Usage: Basic interaction metrics like pageviews and bounce rate

Technical: Network and server metrics

DOM Timings: Document-parsing metrics

Distribution: Timing buckets for different metrics

Map Overlay: Geographic data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions

Site Usage: Basic interaction metrics like pageviews and bounce rate

Technical: Network and server metrics

DOM Timings: Document-parsing metrics

Speed Suggestions report

Site Speed Suggestions are optimization tips tailored to your site. You can implement these tips to make your pages load faster. To see the suggested optimizations for your pages:

In Behavior > Site Speed > Speed Suggestions, click the link in the PageSpeed Suggestions column for the page you want to optimize. The Page Speed Insights page opens.

In the left-hand navigation, click the links for the suggestions that are specific to the improvement of your page. The suggestions explain why they're relevant to your site, and how you can implement them.

Many web pages include dynamic content such as ads, which differ each time the page is loaded. As a result, the score and suggestions you see for your page in Analytics may differ slightly from what is displayed in the PageSpeed report.

If you see Help in the PageSpeed Suggestions column, this indicates that we were unable to analyze the page at the given URL, and you should try again later. If the error persists, it may be due to any of the following:

The hostname you have configured in the Website’s URL section of your View Settings is not a valid hostname for your website.

The URLs shown in the Site Speed Suggestions report are not valid URLs for your website.

You are tracking multiple subdomains and not using a single hostname.

You have set up view filters to rewrite your URLs.

The page requires authentication.

Learn more about the PageSpeed Tools for analysis and optimization, including techniques to implement the suggestions provided in the report.

The PageSpeed Score indicates the extent to which you can improve the load time of a page. A high score indicates less room for improvement. A low score indicates more room for improvement. The score isn't a measurement of speed, but only the extent to which the speed can be improved.

A score of 100 indicates that Analytics successfully analyzed the page, but has no recommendations for improvement. None in the score column indicates that an error occurred during analysis of the page. You can run the report again later to see whether the analysis succeeded. If all of the rows have a value of None, or if there are only a few rows of data where you would normally expect more, that can indicate a time-out issue.

User Timings report

The User Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual resource performance (e.g., images, videos, buttons). The report includes the following tabs:

Explorer: Resource data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions

Distribution: Timing buckets for different metrics

Map Overlay: Geographic data in the context of different primary and secondary dimensions

Notes

Site speed tracking has no impact on bounce rate for your site.

Site speed can only be tracked from browsers that support the HTML5 Navigation Timing interface or have the Google Toolbar installed. Typically this includes: Chrome, Firefox 7 and above, Internet Explorer 9 and above, Android 4.0 browser and above, as well as earlier versions of Internet Explorer with the Google Toolbar installed.

The calculation for Average Page Load Time changed in November 2011: Average Page Load Time now includes redirection time. You may see an increase in your site's overall page load time, depending on the number and significance of redirects on your site. When you make date comparisons, please remember that data collected before November 2011 doesn't include redirection times.

Starting around Nov 16, 2011, many sites saw increased Avg. Page Load Times. These inflated metrics are not a real speed issue for the sites, but a result of bugs in Firefox’s Navigation Timing implementation, specifically, how the start of navigation is calculated. As a result, pages viewed in Firefox show higher values for Avg. Redirection Time, and thus Avg. Page Load Time. This was fixed as part of Firefox 9, released on December 10, 2011 and auto-updated to users over the following 3-4 weeks. If your site has higher page-load times during this period, you can determine if this is due to Firefox by checking the data along the Browser dimension.

By default, a fixed 1% sampling of your users make up the data pool from which the page timing metrics are derived. See the analytics.js developer documentation for details on customizing the Site Speed sample rate.

Previous versions of Site Speed required a tracking-code change to add _trackPageLoadTime. Sites with the deprecated call still collect speed data at the 10% sampling rate. However, this call will be ignored in the future, and the sample rate will change to the default 1%. Consider updating your tracking code to use setSiteSpeedSampleRate() to set a higher sampling rate.